Emmett Till casket to go on display at new D.C. museum

The casket that held the mutilated body of civil rights martyr Emmett Till for 50 years will go on public display in 2015 at the nation's newest African-American history museum, officials said.

The move comes a month after the casket was found discarded at a south suburban cemetery.

Officials with the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture are expected to formally announce the casket's donation just before a memorial ceremony Friday to commemorate the 54th anniversary of Till's murder.

Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart and Emmett Till's cousin, Simeon Wright, stand before Till's original casket that lies in disrepair on the grounds of Burr Oak Cemetery in Alsipon July 10. (Tribune / Zbigniew Bzdak)

Members of Till's family and museum officials--including its director, Lonnie G. Bunch III--are expected to attend the ceremony at Roberts Temple Church of God in Christ, the site of Till's original funeral.

"We are both honored and humbled that the Till family has entrusted this sacred object to the museum for preservation and safekeeping," Bunch, former president of the Chicago History Museum, said in a news release.

"The death of Emmett Till shocked the conscience of the world and fueled the civil rights movement. It is our duty to ensure that this iconic artifact is preserved so that we will never forget," he said.

Simeon Wright, Till's cousin and one of the last people to see Till alive, was surprised to learn about the donation late Wednesday.

"If it's true it's great news for the family and for all that happened in Burr Oak and we thought they were going to set up a monument there. I can't think of better place to put it," Wright said.

The casket will be taken to Washington, D.C., the site of the new museum, where it will be evaluated by conservation experts and readied for display when the museum opens in late 2015, spokeswoman Linda St. Thomas said. The casket will be kept out of the public view during its restoration, she said.

Till was originally buried in the casket with a glass top at his mother's request so that the public could see her son's badly-disfigured corpse. The body was exhumed and autopsied in 2005 as part of an FBI probe to find possible accomplices in the half-century old crime.

After Till was reburied in a new casket, his relatives had hoped to have it donated to a black history museum, but they were shocked when it was discovered rusting in a damp shed at Burr Oak Cemetery in July during the uncovering of an alleged grave-reselling scam.

Till, who was 14 when he was killed, was spending time with family members in Money, Miss., in 1955 when his whistling at a white woman supposedly led to his kidnapping and brutal killing at the hands of her husband and his half-brother. An all-white jury acquitted the men of murder, but they later admitted the crime in an article in Look magazine.